Brazos UI: de Facto Standard User Interface for IBM BPM

Nothing more flattering than someone writing a practical how-to for BPM UI and using your BPM User Interface framework to do it! And that’s just what happened over on the Process Ramblings blog. He was writing his BPM UI tips – but he used Brazos as the framework to illustrate the examples – a great endorsement. And I think this is yet another sign that Brazos UI is really the de facto standard for IBM BPM at this point.

He starts with this comment (emphasis added):

This article is a compilation of important tips that can be used to improve UI design in BPM applications. These tips are based on the useful feedback that I have received from clients over the years and the good practices that website developers follow while designing UI.

Note: I first sketched the layout of UI based on the tips in this article and then implemented them using IBM BPM. Fortunately I discovered a really great UI toolkit from BP3 (Brazos UI Toolkit) which fulfilled almost all of the requirements that I was looking for and in the shortest amount of time.

Well. That is the kind of compliment we love to hear about Brazos. Kudos to the team that put it together and maintains it today! In general I agree with his comments and approach. There’s just one part that deviates from how we approach it. He included a sketch of his UI as a “wire frame” in a sense. But at BP3, we do the wireframes with Brazos – cutting out a step that often leads people off the path of what can be efficiently implemented:

I like his advice for using a breadcrumb at the top of the page. The reasoning is that process diagram screens tend to take up space and launch in a separate window. Think of the breadcrumbs up top as the milestones, if they’re representing more than one page each, or pages if they each represent a page.

In particular, I like that he recommends including charts in your user interface – providing relevant information to your users. Brazos Charts makes that easy to do in a Brazos UI. He didn’t mention it – but everything he shows in his post will be mobile-ready as well. Brazos is just the right tool for BPM.

The post even covers tabular data, inline validations in Brazos, conditional visibility and transitions, and icons. It really is a fantastic tutorial for someone starting out with BPM user interfaces – and especially for someone doing it with Brazos.